


Historical Appendices to "It's Only You" -- aka Lady Goat's Rough and Ready Classical Greece Reference Kit

by LadyGoat



Series: It's Only You [1]
Category: Classical Greece
Genre: Appendixes, Classical History, Historical References, Other, World Building Reference
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-01 23:39:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16775245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyGoat/pseuds/LadyGoat
Summary: These started as chapter endnotes to my Assassin's Creed Odyssey fic I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2018. When I realized that I was actually going to complete the month and the fic, I decided to put together a "remastered" version of the fic with reorganized historical notes which are gathered together here in separate chapters for easy reference.You can probably understand the fic without reading these appendices, but if you want them, here they are.If you use this reference in creating your own fic, please do me the kindness of leaving kudos or a comment!





	1. Notes on Names, Noun Declension, and Transliteration

Ancient Greeks identified themselves with a single name. If they needed to be more specific, they'd add their patronymic and when away from home, their city-state of origin. When they were at home, they would tell you which particular neighborhood they came from, or if it were more relevant, their tribal affiliation. Those who were especially important and/or famous might get an epithet (like "Eagle Bearer") but it wouldn't be something your friends would call you, usually. Barnabas, who regularly refers to Alexios as a demigod, probably calls him "Eagle Bearer" all the damned time.

Around the time of Homer (about 400 years before the events of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey), the patronymic of a name was formed by adding the suffix -ides to the father’s name for the nominative case. By the time of Classical Greece, this had given way to simply using the genitive case (possessive form) of the father’s name as a patronymic. Hence Alexios is Alexios Nikolaou in this story and not Alexios Nikolaides.

Declining Greek nouns is a son of a bitch, let me tell you. "Lykaiskon"/”Alexiskos” are, if I am remembering correctly (and I may not be) the diminutive versions of theirs name, which is to say the pet name/affectionate version. Classical Greek was not a neat and tidy language, unlike Classical Latin. Give me five declensions and the ablative but all of it nice and regular and not requiring finding a stem and figuring out how to turn someone's name neuter - because that ALSO was part of making it diminutive. Study Latin, that's my advice. The whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that “Alexios” as a name is an anachronism. It’s not Classical Greek, it’s Byzantine Greek, and that area of the world wouldn’t start speaking Greek until after Alexander the Great conquered it, which comes roughly 70 years after the end of the Second Peloponnesian war in 405BCE, and a century after the game (and the Second Peloponnesian War) starts in 431BCE.

All of this is entirely aside from transliterating names (switching them from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet we use for English). I have tended to be more consistent with academic convention than the game's convention (using Boiotia instead of Boeotia) because the game will err on the side of familiarity, which means in some cases erring on the side of later spellings that will be more familiar to modern eyes. Much like they called Bayek's village Siwa in the last game, and not Sekht-Imauw, which is the name Bayek would have known it by. Hence why you will find “Lakedaimon” and derivatives instead of “Lakonia” (or worse, "Laconia"), the latter being the modern name of an administrative area of Greece that didn’t come into use until long after the time period of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The convention we inherited from Rome by which the Greek letter kappa is transliterated as the Latin alphabet’s “c” is not to be borne as it introduces ambiguity in pronunciation. The Romans really do ruin everything. Hence Lakedaimon and not “Lacedaemon” - I similarly refuse to transliterate iota as “e” just because the orderly bastards in Rome wanted it that way.

At any rate, you can usually google the transliterations I have used if context doesn’t clarify them for you. I also find more direct transliteration to be a help with pronunciation, because none of us are ancient Romans anymore. Although if you did study Latin and came to Classical Greek authors via Roman translations of their works you are probably going to want to throw a book at my head at some point during this fic. Resist the urge, the versions of names you learned were corrupted by decadent Rome.


	2. Alexios and Spartan Citizenship, and Briefly Touching on the Agoge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Xenophon really is your friend here. "The Polity of the Lacedaemonians" is short and pretty plain language, so I highly recommend reading it for a source on Classical Sparta.

Both the game and I are playing fast and loose with history here. Since he never completed the agoge, in which the sons of Spartaite (citizen) men were enrolled for training from age 7 to age 30, Alexios isn't a Spartaite himself. While he clearly isn't one of the helots, his social standing would have been that of a foreigner or more likely one of the perioikoi -- free craftspeople who did the weaving, smithing, and other skilled labor that kept Lakedaemonia running. The perioikoi were also the only people allowed to travel to other cities. Spartaites needed special permission, and helots were tied to the land they worked.

Since Stentor clearly DID complete the agoge (otherwise he wouldn't be a general), he would be the preferred heir for Nikolaos, sparkly special bloodline or no sparkly special bloodline.

You also have to ask yourself why Alexios apparently never went to the agoge. The sons of Spartaites were taken from their mothers at 7 years old and sent to the agoge, where they lived in communal barracks until they were 30. But we're shown Alexios living at home when he was 10 or 12 (the game is a little unclear on how old he was when Nikolaos threw him off Mount Taygetos). Historical sources suggest that Spartaite men sometimes had other men impregnate their wives (they were REALLY into eugenics) so the fact that Alexios wasn't Nikolaos's biological son shouldn't have made a difference.

There was one exception to the rule of agoge attendance, and that was the heirs of the royal houses. Neither the Agiad heir nor the Eurypontid heir had to attend the agoge, presumably because it would have been an unacceptable risk to their lives. For Myrrine to keep Alexios out of the agoge, she had to have had plans for him from the beginning, because she was risking not only his citizenship but the citizenship of his descendants (by blood or adoption). 

The best source on the Sparta agoge is Xenophon’s “The Polity of the Lacedaemonians” which you can find together with his explication and commentary on Athens right here for free on Project Gutenberg. I won’t recap it, but let us say that it is also an invaluable source for things such as the Spartan custom of men who were too old to get their young wives pregnant inviting a younger man to live with them and do that duty. Sparta is ripe for poly fanfic, o my friends and readers. Anyway, the sons of non-citizens could attend the agoge for education, which included music and literacy, for the payment of some hefty fees. Xenophon sent his sons there to be educated, hence his familiarity with the agoge and Sparta in general.

PS Spartans were a bunch of commies.


	3. Clothing in Classical Greece vs Assassin's Creed Odyssey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does what it says on the tin.

The chiton is the basic garment you see most everyone in. It's made of a long rectangle of cloth wrapped around the body and fastened at one or both shoulders and then belted because one side is just...open. Classical Greeks did not go in for tailoring. A himation is a much larger rectangle of cloth that was wrapped over this. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is _extremely_ iffy on its depictions of clothing. A lot of it isn’t from the Classical Greece of the 5th century BCE but rather later, post-Roman times. Alkibiades in the game is wearing only a himation, which would be a toga in Roman terms and isn’t something he would have worn. Markos wears a poor man's himation over a chiton. Alexios is wearing a chiton fastened at both shoulders and nothing else when we see him first, although there's apparently something under it to stop us seeing his manly thighs up to the hip (Ubisoft hates us). A chlamys was a short cloak worn by military types. The closest the game gets to showing us one is the cloth at the top of the "mercenary armor" sets. A chitoniskos (note the diminutive suffix on “chiton” — this was a shorter version of the normal knee-length garment for men) was what fighters wore under their armor. Presumably it didn't require pinning at the shoulders, because I can't imagine having metal pins bearing the weight of your armor would be at all comfortable. The pins were called peronai by the Greeks but you’ll have an easier time googling them if you use “fibulae”, which is the Latin name for them. They were in use right up through the medieval era to pin cloaks, all across Europe.

Underwear for men and women consisted of a loincloth thing, called perizoma. Women also wore a strophion, a band of cloth wrapped around the breasts to support and immobilize them.

In game, Lykaon appears to be wearing a double-layered chiton fastened at one shoulder and belted with cloth rather than a rope. This isn't really historical, a man of his evident modest wealth (dyed and patterned clothing with a fancy pin for the shoulder! Jewelry!) would have both shoulders fastened and be wearing a himation when not at home, or when he had visitors. So I fixed that.

Poor people wore undyed clothing in natural colors. The wealthier you were, the more color you could afford to wear. Likewise, patterns woven into the fabric were harder to achieve than plain fabric (And most often were probably made via a tablet-woven salvadge setting up the warp of the fabric). Classical Greeks had thread wrapped in gold, which they could use to make cloth of gold in various patterns. The warp-weighted looms they used were enormously flexible in terms of what they could weave, if a complete pain in the ass to set up.

Because your clothing was just squares and rectangles of fabric, it was also your bedding at night. There were variations of the chiton for women but the himation was the same for everyone. Regional variations also existed, and young Spartan women scandalized the Greek world by wearing an outfit similar to Lykaon’s to engage in athletics.

I’ve opted to make clothing in this fic more correct than the game (with one or two exceptions) because I don’t have to budget for developing visual models, and because clothing is a fundamental cultural artifact. It’s a real pity it preserves so poorly in archaeological contexts.


	4. Homosexuality (specifically gay men) In Classical Greece

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Also why I chose not to be a stickler for historical accuracy on these points -- always think about who your obsession with accuracy may injure. No one was going to get hurt by my deep-seated need to fasten chitons at both shoulders, but homophobia is extremely different.

Entire careers have been built on writing about same-sex sexual behavior in Classical Greece. The quick and un-nuanced version of classical Greek attitudes toward male homosexuality is that they didn't care much that you were doing it. They cared about who was topping and who was bottoming. The misogyny inherent in their society meant that the bottom was seen as taking on a passive, womanly role that was shameful. There were many words, none of them complementary, for adult men who enjoyed being penetrated by other adult men — pathikos, kinaidos, Aristophanes referred to them as “euryproktoi”, a reference to gaping assholes (the modern equivalent, perhaps, would be calling people goatses?). There is no specific word for adult men who topped other adult men; playing the penetrative partner was just what adult men did. In the context of the widespread practice of adult men carrying on relationships with adolescent boys, such a man was an erastes. The boy he courted was an eromenos, and no stigma was attached to that role. It was only when he became an adult and continued to enjoy anal sex as the penetrated partner that it became a matter of stigma, jokes, and occasionally being outlawed.

I've deliberately toned down the peculiar homophobia in Classical Greece in this fic not because I don't care, but because fuck it, nobody wants to read pages of period-appropriate homophobia. Likewise while it would be perfectly historically accurate to have eg Sokrates pining after an eromenos (he was notoriously “boy crazy”), I’m not going there. To modern eyes it reads very much as child sexual abuse and again, no one wants pages full of period-appropriate abuse. Likewise I have given Lykaon and Alexios supportive, affirming, and loving friends and family because this is fiction, dammit, and that’s what people deserve. But if you’re an absolute stickler for historical accuracy, these are points at which my fic departs from Classical Greek attitudes.

The flip side of Classical Greek attitudes toward male homosexuality however is that the bonds of love between men were seen as really great for military morale in some circles. Presumably they didn't think too hard about the top/bottom thing in Thebes when they were forming a military unit entirely of pairs of male lovers (The Sacred Band of Thebes is probably ripe for fic). Spartans were praised for fighting for all of their allies just as if they were their lovers. I’ve chosen to incorporate elements of this because I find the idea that people are expecting Alexios to be even more mighty to protect and impress Lykaon almost unbearably sweet.

It’s also worth noting that while there’s a lot of argument over whether Classical Greeks thought of sexuality as an orientation like we do today, what is indisputable is that even when the practice was illegal, there were men living together as partners. They might get mocked in the plays of Aristophanes and company, but the laws weren’t seriously enforced and they obviously considered the risk worth it in order to live with who they loved.

The other oddity is that Classical Greeks don’t seem to have spent much time thinking about same-sex love and desire and sex between women at all compared to the endless amounts of time they spent thinking, writing, and talking about the same between men. There was one attested rude word for women who enjoyed penetrating other women, but not an entire lexicon. Sappho is really the only writer whose work has survived that talks about women at all. Perhaps because of misogyny, perhaps because the vast majority of writers were men, etc etc, this is a curious blank spot in Classical Greek thought.

If you have time for a long read, I highly recommend Sexuality and The Body in Ancient Greece by Marilyn Arthur-Katz. It’s a fascinating dive into Greek attitudes towards everything from male homosexual behavior to menstruation.


	5. Food And Drink And Mealtimes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you put honey on olives and it does not immediately cause you to want to cut your own tongue out, please reach out to me, I'd like to include your experience here!
> 
> I'll have to update this when I get around to attempting to make tiganites.

Wine was always mixed with water in ancient Greece - drinking your wine straight was considered to be dangerous. On the other hand, they also drank wine with every. freaking. meal. Breakfast was often bread dipped in wine to soften it. With abundant access to springs and flowing water (both of which are relatively safe sources, although the Greeks preferred springs) they also drank water. But mostly wine, all the time.

The little pancakes are still a popular Greek food, transliterated "tiganites" these days. A quick google will get you any number of recipes for them. Modern recipes don't use curdled milk, which means they will taste significantly different from what ancient Greeks were eating. Incorporate some sour cream maybe, and then top them with a little cheese and honey and voila. Maybe some walnuts, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Honey was the only sweetener known to ancient Greece, and they used it liberally for desserts and treats. In fact they drizzled olives with honey and ate those. I tried it, and quite frankly it was the most repulsive thing I have ever put in my mouth in my entire life. But then I hate olives. I’m still trying to convince someone who likes olives to try it and get back to me.

Ancient Greeks did some of their cooking indoors and some outdoors, depending on season and weather. We don't get a chance to look inside Lykaon's house in the game (why must you torment the fic writers, Ubisoft) and there's no kitchen outside (I might have spent quite a bit of time examining that house and its surroundings), so I'm editing the game a bit here to include period-appropriate cooking facilities outside. Teganites being fried they'd require a high, hot fire, and no one is going to light that inside in the Mediterranean unless it's winter.

Bread for the most part was unleavened unless you were very fancy - whole wheat pita bread was the order of the day for most folks, occasionally baked in small clay ovens right on the floor of the house if it was winter. Mutton (sheep) and goat were the predominant meats; a sheep under a year is generally referred to as a lamb and might be eaten if you were prosperous enough to buy one. Beef would be something of a rarity for most. They had domesticated geese and swans, and they probably had chickens (here’s a great Twitter thread on chickens in Classical Greece).

Classical Greeks did not use silverware. They scooped up scoopable foods with bits of pita bread but otherwise ate with their fingers or drank soups from bowls. In fancy situations like a symposium, they would eat reclining on a couch; otherwise they sat at a table.


	6. Wound Care

Ancient Greeks were in fact taking up washing wounds with vinegar around the time Hippokrates of Kos was doing his thing. Which is not a terrible idea, absent high proof liquor a mild acid like vinegar is an all right disinfectant. I imagine it stings like a bitch though. I'm almost but not quite curious enough to try it next time I have a minor wound, just to see how many profane terms I know.

Stitching up wounds has been known since at least 3000BCE in Egypt, where we find the first report. It was probably significantly less fun than it is now. Materials used included animal sinew, dried strips of intestine, silk, and plant fibers like linen. The strips of intestine ("catgut") continued to be used until fairly recently, when nylon and silk and dissolving stitches took over.

Classical Greeks definitely associated a bad smell with a bad outcome when it came to wounds. While they didn’t have antibiotics, they did at least make reasonably good attempts given the knowledge at the time to keep people alive. However, they associated pus with a good outcome, possibly because it was so common to see. And while we praise Hippokrates of Kos as the father of modern medicine, he was also the inventor of the “four humors” school of thought that persisted through the medieval era and led to things like bleeding patients. So it wasn’t all enlightenment, healthy food, and exercise.


	7. Paper in The Ancient World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On writing surfaces.

The ancients didn't have paper as we know it, which is pretty much a soup of plant cellulose fibers made into flexible sheets. Vellum and parchment, made from specially prepared animal hides, were known but were EXTREMELY labor intensive to prepare. Labor intensive like I, who think nothing of shearing a sheep by hand, cleaning and preparing the wool by hand, spinning it by hand, and then weaving it by hand into cloth, won't even touch the process to make vellum or parchment. They were used for things that needed to be long-lasting and durable and expensive.

However the Egyptians had invented papyrus paper, made from the reed of the same name. The process to make it is kinda labor intensive but not really any worse than, say, pressing flowers or making cheese by hand. The Greeks imported papyrus from Egypt and used it for writing that could be cheaper and more temporary. Like, say, ransom notes and copies of popular books of poetry. Most of the copies of ancient Greek poetry we have come from papyri that were preserved in Egypt after the Greeks conquered the country (after the time period of this game, Origins is set during Greek Egypt) or were copied and/or quoted by the Romans. That's how we have the genuine line from Sappho that gets partly used in Odyssey. The entire fragment is: "You may forget, but let me tell you this: someone, in some future time, will think of us."

Still, papyrus wasn’t exactly cheap, so if you were composing a longer work you would probably do it on thin sheets of wood covered in wax, scraping away the wax with a stylus. This was easier to edit. You (or your scribe) would then make a nice copy on papyrus or on vellum. If you were writing a book, the sheets would then be collected together and bound. If it were going to stay a scroll, it would be rolled up nicely.


	8. Livestock in Classical Greece vs Assassin's Creed Odyssey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They got this so very wrong.

Sooner or later you have to talk livestock when talking a pre-combustion society. And while Ubisoft puts an enormous amount of work into eg the architecture of the settings of their games, I’m here to tell you that the domesticated animals absolutely suck.

They did get the species mix mostly correct. Mostly. Classical Greece had cats, sailors having smuggled them out of Egypt several hundred to a thousand years before that. Ubisoft should have included them in the setting. They also had domesticated geese! Where are the geese? But the chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, and horses should all be present and are. The problem comes with the way these animals are portrayed.

Let’s start with the chickens: they’re an improvement over Origins, where we saw hens modeled on modern heavy layers. The morphology of the chickens in Odyssey is much more accurate: they are light-bodied and small! But every single one of them is a rooster. Where are the hens? How are these roosters procreating?

The sheep are a mess. They’ve reused the sheep from Origins, which appear to have been modeled on Barbary sheep rams. The sheep should look more like Soays: they should have wool, and be small, and oh yes there should be some ewes instead of a population entirely consisting of rams. White sheep and heavily white spotted brown sheep would be prevalent. If the sheep we see in Odyssey were the sheep that had actually existed in Ancient Greece, Jason never would have had a Golden Fleece as the sheep we’re shown are hair sheep that don’t grow a fleece.

The goats, labeled “ibex”, are sort of acceptable insofar as they’re modeled on the Bezoar Goat. The Bezoar Goat is Capra aegagrus hircus, just the same as the domestic goat, and for good reason: it’s the descendants of early domesticated goats who returned to the wild as feral goats, not a true wild goat at all. But for these to be domesticated goats (and we’re never shown any in domestication, ugh) they would need to have smaller horns and a greater variety of coat patterns. At least there are both bucks and does! These goats can procreate!

The cattle are possibly the worst. Once again they’ve reused a model from Origins. It wasn’t accurate there, either. The cattle portrayed in the game are indicine cattle, with a hump on their withers, and have the massive, extremely long horns of Ankole-Watusi cattle. They are, in fact, the very image of Brahma-Ankole crosses common in Texas, US, and in some areas of sub-Saharan Africa. They are not at all accurate to either Classical Greece or Ptolemaic Egypt. The cattle in both cases should have the flat backs and smaller horns of taurine cattle, the kind of cattle Europeans and Americans think of when they hear the word “cow”. While Classical Greece had trade links to the east, livestock weren’t moving along it and there’s nothing in the archaeological record to support cattle that looked like modern Brahma-Ankole crosses existing in Classical Greece. The cattle should be about 4 feet (1.3m-ish) at the shoulder and look something like the fighting stock of Spain - athletic and muscular cattle.

And then we come to the pigs. Oh, the pigs, where to even start. The wild pigs are great! They’re huge, hairy, long-nosed beasts with tusks that want to eat you. Accurate! The domestic pigs look like large-ish white Vietnamese pot belly pigs and that is incredibly wrong on so many levels. They’re the one exception to the “all the livestock is too damn big” rule. They should look like slightly smaller versions of the wild pigs running around, not like something you could (and would want to) cuddle and invite into your home to prop your feet on. Like the cattle, almost everything about them is completely wrong.

The horses only have one major problem, which is a relief after the cattle and pigs. They’re too damn big. Actually all of the livestock is too damn big (except the pigs); the push to breed larger animals didn’t start until the 15th or 16th century and up until then domesticated farm animals were much smaller than what you see around you today. The horses should look like the large end of the pony scale, not the massive warmblood beasts that tower over their riders. If you don’t feel vaguely guilty for putting an adult in full armor on it, it is in fact too big. Also, where are the chariots? They were in common use in Classical Greece for racing and for war.

It mystifies me that Ubisoft can put hundreds of hours of research into the architecture but screw up the domesticated animals so badly. Agriculture is a fundamental aspect of any culture, since it tells you how they feed themselves and what foods they prize. One phone call to a zooarchaeologist would have straightened things out quite nicely.


	9. What do you call a mercenary in Classical Greece?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Look this bothered me all through the game and it still bothers me every time I see the word "misthios" mistranslated.

What did you call a mercenary in Classical Greece? Well, not “misthios” (μίθιος). That word meant “salaried” or “hired” and when used as a noun applied as well to someone you hired to tend your sheep or pick your grapes as it did to someone who worked for wages as a soldier. Thucydides, writing about the Second Peloponnesian War, uses the word “misthophoros” (μισθοφόρος), as do Xenophon and Arrian. Plato and Demosthenes use it as an adjective to describe men who worked for wages as soldiers. Whereas there isn’t a single citation of “misthios” being used in a military sense to describe someone who hired himself out as a soldier for pay.

The service of a misthophoros was misthophoria (μισθοφόρια) and his wages (especially land set aside for mercenaries to settle on) were misthophorikos (μισθοφόρικος). Roman period Greek authors also used misthophorikos to refer to the mercenaries themselves, but that’s hundreds of years after the time period we’re looking at, which is contemporaneous (more or less) with Thucydides and Xenophon.

All of these words and concepts are rooted in “misthos” (μισθός), which is the general word for wages.

The other term associated with mercenaries is “xenoi” (ξένοι). The same word is used more generically for “foreigners”. The commander of xenoi was a xenagos hegeomai (ξεναγός ἡγέομαι). These are Doric terms, which is to say they were the terms that would have been used in Sparta and in Kephallonia, where people also spoke the Doric dialect of Greek. But it’s unlikely that Alexios would have referred to himself as a “foreigner” in Greece, which makes misthophoros a much more reasonable term for him to use.

Unless of course he didn’t think of himself primarily as a _soldier_ for hire, but rather as a jack of all trades, in which case “misthios” is a perfectly appropriate word. But it shouldn’t be translated “mercenary” but rather “hired hand” or equivalent.


End file.
